Event Description

The Peace Alliance and Board Member and Host Molly Rowan Leach are thrilled to announce the kickoff of the ongoing Restorative Justice dialogue series with the first special guest, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow. You might recall this series' inception in the last year with Ms. Leach that has featured many world leaders in justice and compelling community dialogue based in a virtual platform/circle that is easily accessible by dialing or skyping in. All councils are recorded and free of charge. Our mission is to expand the immediate accessibility of education, dialogue opportunities, and networking cohesion in the realm of RJ and beyond.

Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar who currently holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University. Prior to joining the Kirwan Institute, Alexander was an associate professor of law at Stanford Law School, where she directed the Civil Rights Clinics. In 2005, she won a Soros Justice Fellowship, which supported the writing of her first book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010). The book has received rave reviews and has been featured in national radio and television media outlets, including NPR, The Bill Moyers Journal, the Tavis Smiley Show, C-Span Washington Journal, among others. In March, the book won the 2011 NAACP Image Award for best non-fiction.

For several years, Alexander served as the Director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California, where she helped to lead a national campaign against racial profiling by law enforcement. While an associate at Saperstein, Goldstein, Demchak & Baller, she specialized in plaintiff-side class action lawsuits alleging race and gender discrimination.

Alexander is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University. Following law school, she clerked for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the United States Supreme Court, and for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Comment Wall

A huge thanks to the overwhelming response to today's council with Michelle Alexander! Since there were so many people who wanted to ask questions that we could not get to, please use this page as a forum to connect with Michelle. I will connect her with this forum page so that she can interact. Check out Michelle's Facebook page and the official website for The New Jim Crow